Cosmic bonks, breakups led to birth of Saturn's moons as dinos died out Had dinosaurs had telescopes, and the wherewithal to use them, they could have seen a series of cosmic prangs around Saturn that created new moons. As far as we can tell, Saturn has 62 moons in orbit around the gas giant all moving in different planes, as well as the planet's famous ring systems. A team from the SETI Institute …
Evidence of collisions are all over Saturn's moons; it's not just Minas that has huge impact craters - outer moons like Iapetus, Hyperion, even the inner tiddlers like Epimetheus look like targets for objects big enough to break them up, but not quite going that far. What with half in retrograde, Trojans and consistencies ranging from rock to icy sponge, the whole system looks like it's the result of a giant Kessler event.
Or maybe Mimas really is the Death Star, but ran out of power after practising on a few inner moons and has been out of action gathering dust for a while now...
"I don't think the original design Death Stars required charging up. We see the second Death Star in RoTJ happily repeatedly blasting the shit out of rebel capital ships with the super laser."
But on the other hand, if you have a super laser that can reduce an entire planet to rapidly spreading rubble, using it to zap relatively puny little capital ships probably doesn't even rate a twitch on the power gauge.
"Macrobius (5th century AD) presents an interpretation of the Saturnalia as a festival of light leading to the winter solstice.[38] The renewal of light and the coming of the new year was celebrated in the later Roman Empire at the Dies Natalis of Sol Invictus, the "Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun," on December 25.[39]"
Many other peoples referred to Saturn as a sun. The Mesopotamian sun god "Shamash" was the planet Saturn in their astronomy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamash. Extensive comparative mythology investigations have turned up some interesting ideas: https://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/arch/040923saturn-ancient.htm
You are a textbook example of the primacy of a deduced point of view meeting new inductive data. It's what' wrong with science if not the world. Yah, new data is a bitch when it challenges old interpretations of old data. It's one of the largest hysteria inducing factors in human affairs. Comparative mythology establishes that the planet Saturn was featured in ancient pantheons as a "sun". There is no question as to inaccuracy of ancient text translation, it was known as "the best sun" and "the first sun". Read the research article at this link: http://qdl.scs-inc.us/2ndParty/Pages/7285.html and get back to me.
it would have been cloudy - except on the nights they were invited over the really boring friends of the missus who need keeping in the good books for a reason I cant remember, or childs school do or something*.
Or at least that's my experience having shelled out for a really nice (so I'm lead to believe) 12"er.
*tonight is going to be brilliantly clear and my back has gone so no way I can cart the bugger outside.
«Due to its huge size, Saturn's gravitational pull is so strong, it causes geological activity in its moons.» While Saturn has a mass about 95 times as large as that of the Earth, its average density is less than 1/8 as large and the gravitational pull at its surface only 8.96 m/s², or about 92 % of that at the Earth's surface....
Henri
It's not the strength of the pull per se that heats things up, it's variation in the strength of the pull as the moon varies its distance from the planet while following a non-circular obit. The stronger the pull the more the moon is stretched. As the pull alternately strengthens and relaxes, the moon is alternately pulled more and less out of shape from spherical, causing frictional heating.
Velikovsky wasn't batshit crazy, just a little irreverent towards Occam's Razor: His hypotheses were way more extravagant than needed.
That doesn't of course make them wrong, and indeed, cosmic collisions are now known to have done all sorts of stuff in Earth's past, just not necessarily the stuff Immanuel claimed.
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